The open-source platform Kubernetes has rapidly become one of the leading tools for cloud-native operations. Whether it is for automating the calling of services, managing applications, or even just creating the foundation for cloud projects, there is a lot you can do with Kubernetes.
Due to the extensive possible uses of this platform, over 21.4% of users of the platform suggest that they’re in charge of a cluster with at least 500 nodes or more. This demonstrates how complicated Kubernetes can become when you pull back the curtain. That’s not all, with almost 30% of users running Kubernetes on multiple devices at once, furthering the complexity of this system.
Within this article, we’ll be discussing how Kubernetes manages its own system, delving into the management system to reveal exactly how this world-class platform functions. Let’s get right into it!
What is Kubernetes Monitoring?
There is no doubt that Kubernetes is an extremely powerful tool. With a range of uses, DevOps teams, IT technicians, and software developers routinely turn to it to solve their problems.
As the system of Kubernetes becomes more complicated, users turn to monitoring practices and tools to ensure that everything is running smoothly. The act of monitoring ensures that across all the different resources, nodes, and pods within the system, everything is running as smoothly as possible.
Kubernetes monitoring ensures your team is alerted as quickly as possible if an element of the system fails, allowing you to rapidly deploy people to fix the issue and ensure everything else remains working as well as possible.
Why is Monitoring Important?
In any service, monitoring is the act of ensuring that everything is working as it should. With monitoring, you’ll know if something is out of place or fails to work, meaning you can fix it and get things back on track. Alongside this, there are four main reasons that ensuring your Kubernetes platform is always monitored is a great practice for your platform and for your business.
These are the main reasons that Kubernetes monitoring is a great idea:
- Cost Management
- Ensure Performance
- Papertrail
- Security
Let’s break these down further.
Cost Management
At the end of the day, if you’re using Kubernetes to run a business, especially if it’s a software as a service (SaaS) platform, then you need to ensure that everything is running as well as possible. If your service goes down, then you cannot charge people to use it, leading to you losing out on profit as a business.
Alongside this, effective Kubernetes management will allow you to keep track of which resources are being used by the platform. If an application is using too many nodes, monitoring will allow you to realize this ahead of time and put a stop to it. Resource allocation is an important aspect of monitoring, allowing you to conduct cost analysis and pinpoint methods you could use to reduce your cost overhead and maximize output.
Ensure Performance
When faced with assessing the effectiveness of different Kubernetes clusters, the only methods that you have to do so are through Kubernetes monitoring. By assessing how different clusters work, how many resources they consume, and how their hardware functions, you’re able to accurately analyze the cluster itself.
From there, teams are able to make more informed choices about how they manage the entire system. If you’re looking to make your system run as smoothly as possible, then one of the primary things you should focus on is ensuring your management and monitoring systems are in place.
Paper trail
When using a complex platform with many nodes, resources, and pods, Kubernetes can be quite a difficult system to navigate. If your business realizes that certain resources are being used up, then you can use monitoring tools to check why they’re being used up and by which teams.
By monitoring the system as a whole, you’ll be able to create an effective understanding of the virtual paper trail of different resources that are being used up. By tracing these resources, you’re able to map out how your Kubernetes system is working, who is focusing on different pods, and which nodes are doing which functions.
Security
Perhaps the most important reason to make sure that you have monitoring in place for your Kubernetes systems is for security purposes. As you increase the complexity of your platform, naturally, you’ll have to open up new ports and new structures within the Kubernetes platform. The more complicated the platform, the more open you are to breaches, with hackers having a larger attack surface to focus their penetrations.
Kubernetes monitoring ensures that you know the current condition of all of your services, helping you to keep systems in place that alert you if anything is going wrong. If a job has been completed, or is currently in action, that wasn’t requested by your teams, that might be a sign that there is a breach in your system.
With monitoring, you’ll realize that this is going on ahead of time, allowing you to react quickly and remedy the problem.
Final Thoughts
Whether it be monitoring node resource utilization, the number of running pods that are currently available to handle different workloads, or even the total amount of nodes that the cloud provider is billing you for, understanding your entire Kubernetes ecosystem is vital for any modern business that uses this service.
If your business uses Kubernetes, then you should be sure that monitoring is one of the first focuses you spend your time setting up when you launch the platform. Avoiding creating additional costs and helping to create a more streamlined system, Kubernetes monitoring is one of the most vital practices you can incorporate into your workflow.
Moving from a pod to node level, be sure you understand how your resources are being allocated, and how your Kubernetes system interacts.
